Cotton production in the United States

Left: Acres of upland cotton harvested as a percent of harvested cropland acreage (2007). Right: Unloading freshly harvested cotton using a mechanical cotton picker in Texas.

The United States exports more cotton than any other country, though it ranks third in total production, behind China and India.^[1] Almost all of the cotton fiber growth and production occurs in the Southern United States and the Western United States, dominated by Texas, California, Arizona, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. More than 99 percent of the cotton grown in the US is of the Upland variety, with the rest being American Pima.^[2] Cotton production is a $21 billion-per-year industry in the United States, employing over 125,000 people in total,^[1] as against growth of forty billion pounds a year from 77 million acres of land covering more than eighty countries.^[3] The final estimate of U.S. cotton production in 2012 was 17.31 million bales,^[4] with the corresponding figures for China and India being 35 million and 26.5 million bales, respectively.^[5] Cotton supports the global textile mills market and the global apparel manufacturing market that produces garments for wide use, which were valued at USD 748 billion and 786 billion, respectively, in 2016. Furthermore, cotton supports a USD 3 trillion global fashion industry, which includes clothes with unique designs from reputed brands, with global clothing exports valued at USD 1.3 trillion in 2016.^[6]

Early cotton production in the United States is associated with slavery. By the late 1920s around two-thirds of all African-American tenants and almost three-fourths of the croppers worked on cotton farms, and two in three black women from black landowning families were involved in cotton farming. Cotton farming was one of the major areas of racial tension in its history, where many whites expressed concerns about the mass employment of blacks in the industry and the dramatic growth of black landowners. Southern black cotton farmers faced discrimination and strikes often broke out by black cotton farmers. Although the industry was badly affected by falling prices and pests in the early 1920s, the mechanization of agriculture created additional pressures on those working in the industry. Social pressures caused by returning African American WWI veterans demanding increased civil rights being met by a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the violence the Klan inflicted on rural African Americans explains why many African Americans moved to northern American cities in the 1920s through the 1950s during the "Great Migration" as mechanization of agriculture was introduced, leaving many unemployed.^[7] The Hopson Planting Company produced the first crop of cotton to be entirely planted, harvested, and baled by machinery in 1944.^[7]